The monster of my id is in there!
Perhaps the worst part of Fear In The Night (1947) is the title. I think it should have been named Why Did I Do It? Why?
We meet Vince in his dreams, and this dream is unpleasant: he enters a mirrored room, meets a man and woman, the former crouched on the floor doing something, fights with the man, and kills him, while the woman escapes. When he awakens, in the bed at the hotel where he rents a room, he’s in the sort of wretched shape you might expect, covered in sweat and vastly unsettled.
But as he dresses for work, he becomes even more unsettled. In the pocket of his pants are a key and a button, neither of which he has ever owned, and – he remembers from his dream.
He goes for help to his brother-in-law, a police detective named Cliff. Cliff’s wife, who is Vince’s sister, has just become pregnant for the first time, and he’s understandably distracted and uninterested in Cliff’s problems, but he warns Vince not to bother his sister with these problems at this delicate time.
A day or two later, they meet up for a picnic at the beach, with Vince’s romantic interest along for the ride. Chased from the beach by a violent storm, they drive around and get lost in the hills, until suddenly Vince is giving directions to a house they can stay at.
And he doesn’t know how he’s doing this.
I shan’t spoil how this ends, except that Vince’s attempt to throw himself from a window doesn’t work. This is not a murder mystery so much as a psychological study of good and evil – and how sometimes good must depend on luck to win.
Despite the awful soundtrack, we enjoyed his story a great deal. Not that there aren’t holes in it, and I thought Vince’s love interest was somewhat superfluous, but that’s an arguable point – others in the audience might dispute it. It’s short, to the point, and worth spending the time if you enjoy mysteries of this sort.
And, for you fans of the original Star Trek, Vince is played, in his debut movie performance, by DeForest Kelley, the actor who portrayed Dr. McCoy to great effect. I found this distracting, as sometimes Vince looked like Kelley, and sometimes not. Compounding the problem is that brother-in-law Cliff bears a certain facial resemblance to William H. Macy of Fargo (1996) fame. So be warned.
And here it is.
